IDEAS & TRENDS; Reluctant Conscripts In The March of Technology

AFTER resisting for years, Robert Post finally succumbed to electronic mail.

Mr. Post, a curator of technology at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History and a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had long watched with amused detachment as E-mail became first fashionable and then pervasive in academic circles. But more recently, he felt the peer pressure to join the E-mail community.

"I was made to feel out of it because I didn't have an E-mail address," Mr. Post said. "Then, earlier this year, I was sort of good-naturedly told that I had to get one."

If Mr. Post was a reluctant conscript in the forced march of technology, he has plenty of company these days. With banks merging and their branches closing, customers have little choice but to deal with automated-teller machines, because the ranks of human tellers have been winnowed to near extinction.

And with Microsoft's introduction of Windows 95 last month, there was a flood of phone calls from thousands of befuddled customers, suggesting that not everyone is finding the path to computing's new world a smooth one.

The promise of technology is that it is a liberating force, giving people more freedom, more choice and more free time. Yet technology often seems to be just another form of tyranny or just a new strain of consumerism. It is demanding, it forces people to learn new skills and jargon, and it takes time and money.

In "Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution," the author, Kirkpatrick Sale warns against the concentration of power in the hands of the people who control information.

In "The End of Work," Jeremy Rifkin, an economist, sees the danger of social unrest, as a huge and growing class of technological have-nots becomes increasingly separated from an elite core of affluent knowledge workers. Technopoly

In "Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway," Clifford Stoll, an Internet pioneer, worries about the quality of the time spent on computer networks:

"You lead a much more shallow life online than you do in the real world," he says.

Neil Postman, a professor at New York University, asserts that we live in a "technopoly," a society in which all forms of cultural life are subordinate to technology. It cannot be stopped, he says, but technology can be guided by public debate and policy adjustments.

Every significant technology, according to Mr. Postman, should be subjected to three crucial questions:

What problem is it going to solve?

Whose problem is it?

Will solving the problem create other problems that we can anticipate?

Mr. Postman points to cases in which public debate has brought change.

For instance, the United States abandoned its supersonic transport initiative in the 1960's, after debate in Congress, because, Mr. Postman says, "we decided that getting from New York to Los Angeles in three hours instead of six was not a major benefit that would affect many Americans."

So far, though, computers have not gotten their fair share of scrutiny, according to Mr. Postman. For example, he says, the decision to put computers in schools has gone largely unquestioned, even though there is little evidence that computers improve children's problem-solving skills.

While the march of technology may look daunting to many, others are quick to point out that it is neither a blind march nor a forced one. Consumers, in other words, have a lot of say in determining technology's winners and losers.

Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., points out that consumers rejected inventions like quadraphonic sound and the 1980's version of electronic newspapers, called "videotext." But they gladly adapted to the complex technology of the automobile, which requires training, financing and fuel-finding efforts, because they saw the benefits as outweighing the costs in time, trouble and money.

When Mr. Saffo looks at emerging technologies, he sees more of a slow crawl than a heedless dash. Home banking, electronic airline ticketing and interactive television, he says, will all take a lot longer than some technophiles predict.

Still, he concedes that once most people accept a technology, like bank ATM's, the rest of the populace has little choice but to follow.

"The minority is forced to follow the majority into the next era of technology," Mr. Saffo said. "But the good news is that the majority doesn't move into the future very quickly."

Drag Racing

Historians bring a more playful perspective to technology's relentless advance. They argue that the motive force behind technology is not utility but a deep-seated enthusiasm for new products -- especially in American society.

No one foresaw the impact or the utility of telephones, cars or television when they were first invented, says Mr. Post, the technology historian. But once people began to use them, they came to believe the products were invented for important reasons.

"Often, invention is the mother of necessity," he says.

Mr. Post, who has written a book titled "High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing," says that inventors are mainly driven by their sheer love of pursuing high-tech frontiers.

From space exploration to Star Wars, researchers talk a great deal about man's destiny and the social benefits of science.

But, he says, "I suspect the rhetoric has been mainly a way to seek funding for their technological enthusiasm."

An untroubled zeal for technology, he concludes, is very American. "Disillusioning as it may be for many intellectuals," he said, "there is a huge slice of the American populace for whom the march of technology has nothing but positive connotations."

Drag racers, studied by Mr. Post, reach speeds of more than 300 miles per hour, over a quarter-mile track, in less than five seconds. That, he says, is "a stunning accomplishment and perfectly useless."

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A version of this article appears in print on September 17, 1995, on Page 4004016 of the National edition with the headline: IDEAS & TRENDS; Reluctant Conscripts In The March of Technology. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe